201530620155101419620151962015Karel Tajovský, Ivan H. TufThis is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.http://zoobank.org/6BC07BC0-E030-4682-9F5A-7FB7976CEABFCitation

The papers in this special issue of ZooKeys were presented at the 16th International Congress of Myriapodology (16ICM) held in Olomouc, the Czech Republic on July 20–25, 2014. International Congresses of Myriapodology are scientific meetings of scientists, students and enthusiastic amateurs with specific interest in millipedes, centipedes, symphylans and pauropods, as well as velvet worms. Those are organised under the auspices of the Centre International de Myriapodologie (http://www.myriapodology.org). To date, these congresses have a 46 year tradition and have taken place in 13 countries:

1ICM: 1968 – Paris, France

2ICM: 1972 – Manchester, UK

3ICM: 1975 – Hamburg, Germany

4ICM: 1978 – Gargnano, Italy

5ICM: 1981 – Radford, USA

6ICM: 1984 – Amsterdam, The Netherlands

7ICM: 1987 – Vittorio Veneto, Italy

8ICM: 1990 – Innsbruck, Austria

9ICM: 1993 – Paris, France

10ICM: 1996 – Copenhagen, Denmark

11ICM: 1999 – Bialowieza, Poland

12ICM: 2002 – Mtunzini, South Africa

13ICM: 2005 – Bergen, Norway

14ICM: 2008 – Görlitz, Germany

15ICM: 2011 – Brisbane, Australia

16ICM: 2014 – Olomouc, Czech Republic

16ICM was the first myriapodological congress to be held in the Czech Republic. The 84 participants and 18 accompanying persons came from 24 countries on five continents, making the 16th Congress a truly international and global meeting of myriapod specialists (Figs 1, 2).

The organisers of the 16ICM are very grateful to the Palacký University, Olomouc, which provided us a pleasant area for all scientific as well as social parts of the Congress. We also thank the Biology Centre CAS and partial support from several unnamed colleagues who allowed the participation of young students at this Congress.

Many thanks to Lyubomir Penev and the friendly staff at Pensoft Publishers for making the 16ICM papers freely available to a global online audience.